But they let their enthusiasm to carry out her orders outstrip their ability. They had learned few lessons from the excesses of the Twelve-year War, when the influx of Commonweal slaves had been so overwhelming that almost one in five died of neglect and maltreatment before reaching the Empire. The Slave Corps continued amassing the terrible quantities of bodies that the Empress was demanding, but they would not be able to keep them long. They could not feed them. They could not safeguard them from pestilence. Already the deaths were beginning, choked and starved, plagued and crippled, killed by each other, killed by the brutality of their warders, dying by their own hands.
The senior Slave Corps officers were starting to exchange glances, writing urgently to Capitas to say, We have so many now – but what next? No response came save, occasionally, a Red Watch officer would arrive and remind them that it was not their place to question the Empress.
One such prison facility was within ten miles of Capitas. Slaves stripped from the capital itself had been sent there, but recently the place had become full to bursting with Spiders taken in the war, the overflow from other places already starting to go septic with overcrowding and lack of care.
The inmates were crammed almost shoulder to shoulder into wooden cages still rough with splinters. Whether a slave ate or not depended on the charity of those around them, since there was no way for the Wasps to ensure that food and water reached them all. Each morning there were a few more dead, and all too often the bodies could not be removed.
The place reeked of death, of excrement, of the sour reek of human desperation. The Slave Corps contingent there was constantly being rotated out because men had a tendency to desert rather than face what they found themselves contributing to, or else they began to consider un-Imperial ideas about mercy.
One evening there was a visitor.
The figure approached the gates with a swift stride, as confident as a general, although no Wasp-kinden ever looked as he did. The guards barring his way noted the armour of immaculate black and yellow in a style a thousand years old, ancient Mantis-kinden sentinel plate, a multitude of interlocking pieces, elegant and barbed, something from another time.
They could not quite see the face within the helm, even with the visor up. He was pale, they would say later, and he had surpassingly cold eyes.
‘I am from the Empress,’ he told them. ‘I am come for the slaves.’
He was a Mantis, and everyone knew how Mantids felt about slavery. The prison commander was sent for, a Major Vorken of the Slave Corps, a veteran of the Twelve-year War. The visitor waited patiently for him.
The major, as it happened, had been in the capital recently and had seen the Empress. He recognized the apparition before him as her bodyguard, but that raised more questions than it answered.
‘What are you here for, sir?’ The honorific was a wager: surely no Mantis outranked a major, but to omit it where it was due would doubtless incur harsher consequences than to award it unmerited.
‘I am come for the slaves.’ Again that cold voice, the intonation identical.
Vorken had been uneasy from the moment he set eyes on this man. Now real alarm was rising up within him. ‘The prisoners here are being held by Her Majesty’s own order. I cannot countenance any attempt to release or move them without her written instruction.’ And surely she would send her unloved Red Watch with such orders, anyway, and not this freakish figure from a history book.
‘I am come for the slaves.’ Again. ‘Do not attempt to impede me.’
The figure was past the gate before the guards could react, the major stumbling frantically back to keep out of the intruder’s reach. It was a terrible moment of choice. If the man was the servant of the Empress and acting in that capacity, then any action taken against him was nothing short of treason – crossed pikes for sure. If he had broken from his mistress, though, then letting him meddle with the slaves – perhaps creating some great slave army within march of Capitas itself – would be a betrayal of both the Empire and the corps itself.
Vorken made his call. ‘Stop him! Bring him down! Alive if you can!’
The Mantis turned as a score of slavers descended upon him, noted their stings and snapbows, and then continued towards the nearest cage door.
‘Bring him down!’ the major shouted again, furiously.
Stingshot crackled, boiling off that antique armour without marking it and, though the odd snapbow bolt penetrated, the occupant seemed barely to notice, as though what was inside it was proof against mere steel darts, no matter how vigorously they were thrown.
The helm turned back towards them, and Major Vorken was sure that he saw some spark of disappointment in the way the Mantis held himself.
Then he was moving amongst the men who had attacked him, without seeming to clear the distance in between, cutting them down – cutting them apart – with ruthless efficiency even as they realized they were being attacked. A half-dozen were dead in that first wave of blows, and the rest were scattering, shooting back at nothing, wounding only their comrades.
He hunted them down. It was swifter than Vorken would have thought possible. He stalked shadow to shadow, and Vorken lost track of him almost immediately, then located him again with each cry and scream as the man danced through the city of cages before the staring, starved eyes of the slaves.
Then silence. A minute had passed, or perhaps even less.
Vorken took a deep breath. His life had been fraying at the edges since he had realized that the prison camp could simply not continue to support itself any more, that his orders had carried within them the seeds of their own destruction. Now this man had arrived and seemed to be simply the embodiment of the disaster he had known was coming.
Vorken turned slowly and, of course, the figure was there. Its blade, one of those Mantis claws that folded back against the arm, was barely bloody.
‘I am come for the slaves.’ Pale lips moving, the tone unchanged, as though a score of Vorken’s men were not now dead.
‘Take them.’ Waiting for the death strike.
It did not come. The Mantis had lost interest in him. Instead, he strode to the nearest cage – crammed with two score Spiders in a space where the major would normally have kept a dozen slaves at most.
The blade flashed again, and abruptly the wooden grille of the door was sagging open.
Empress, forgive me, Vorken thought – although he knew she was not the forgiving type.
Then the Mantis went to work. Not to free the slaves. Of course not. Mantids despised slaves as much as they did slavers, it seemed, and despised Spiders more than anyone. But even that could not account for what Vorken was watching. This was not hatred, that most enduring of human traits. This was something beyond the experience of a Slave Corps major, an order of magnitude beyond anything he himself had ever done or ordered.
The Mantis moved on to the next cage. By now the slaves – quicker on the uptake than their masters, perhaps – had begun to shout and cry out for help. Vorken and his surviving men stood silent and paralysed. Help was something they had already tried to offer, although they had not realized that was what they had been doing.